US evangelicals aim to influence European law
In a German court battle, a home-schooled girl was taken from her parents and put in psychiatric ward.
from the April 17, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
US courts eye European precedents
Why are American groups going to such lengths to shape the laws in other countries?
"We realized that if we didn't try to mold precedents abroad, they could come back to hurt us, and that the American legal system as we know might change," says Benjamin Bull, chief counsel for the ADF.
He notes that, for example, US judges have drawn on foreign precedents and international standards in several key cases, such as the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which legalized sodomy in the Lone Star State.
In Germany, one of ADF's allied organizations, the Georgia-based International Human Rights Group (IHRG; formerly the European Defense Fund), has had a hand in more than 40 German home-schooling cases.
Last year, the group's president, Joel Thornton, and a German lawyer appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one home-schooling family.
They argued that forcing the family's Christian children to attend public schools, where the curriculum sometimes runs counter to their beliefs, was a threat to religious freedom.
But the EU court rejected this argument, saying, "Schools represented society, and it was in the children's interest to become part of that society."
On the local level, however, IHRG and its German ally, Schuzh, have won several cases and scored some coups at the negotiating table.
Take, for instance, the case of the Twelve Tribes, a controversial evangelical movement that was founded in the US. Followers live in small, communal groups largely cut off from society.
Until last August, a pocket of Twelve Tribes disciples in Bavaria had been locked in a struggle to keep their children out of public schools.
During that time, they had stacked up around ¤130,000 ($175,000) in fines and seen seven fathers thrown in jail. IHRG and Schuzh were able to persuade the Bavarian ministry of education to allow the group to set up its own school, where children learn creationism instead of evolution and forgo sex education.
The school is now up and running.
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